The Three NAFTA Partners

Pursuant to my linked essay from yesterday about the damage done to Mexican society by NAFTA, about how 30,000,000 Mexican peasants are being driven into poverty, how 12,000,000 more of them have been forced to leave their homes and families behind to find work in the USA and Canada, I've also noticed these two stories from "digby" and "Glenn Greenwald."

To sum up: In yesterday's post it's described how in Mexico, a corporate "free trade" deal has brought hardship to perhaps 42,000,000 Mexicans, and their electoral mobilization behind the anti-NAFTA candidate came to naught due to electoral fraud on the part of the elites.

In Greenwald's story, the fraudulent, corrupt, Democratic leadership has orchestrated the demolition of the strategy of the majority of their colleagues (who were elected by and enjoy the support of the majority of voters and citizens in their country) to prevent US telecom companies from getting retroactive immunity for allowing the anti-democratic bush II regime to spy on American citizens.

How far we've come -- really: disgracefully tumbled -- from the days of the Church Committee, which aggressively uncovered surveillance abuses and then drafted legislation to outlaw them and prevent them from ever occurring again. It is, of course, precisely those post-Watergate laws which the Bush administration and their telecom conspirators purposely violated, and for which they are about to receive permanent, lawless protection.
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Analogously, in 1973, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its work in uncovering the Watergate abuses, and that led to what would have been the imminent bipartisan impeachment of the President until he was forced to resign in disgrace. By stark and depressing contrast, in 2006, Jim Risen, Eric Lichtblau and the NYT won Pulitzer Prizes for their work in uncovering illegal spying on Americans at the highest levels of the Government, and that led to bipartisan legislation to legalize the illegal spying programs and provide full-scale retroactive amnesty for the lawbreakers. That's the difference between a country operating under the rule of law and one that is governed bylawlessness and lawbreaking license for the politically powerful and well-connected.

In digby's story, we hear of the absolute immunity from any prosecution enjoyed by US corporations in the illegal occupation of Iraq. Not even the employees of these privileged corporations have any means of redress when their human rights are violated, because the entire "business" environment has been made-to-order to ensure unaccountability and therefore, maximum profits.

Corporate power is the thread tying all of this together. We know they can get the government to grant them amnesty for breaking the law. And in this case, they hire their own arbitrator to conduct sham hearings looking into malfeasance by their own employees.

In Mexico, elections are stolen, journalists are murdered, people are impoverished. In the United States, elections are stolen, international law is inoperative, all laws against corporate plunder and rape and murder are inoperative. Citizens are spied on, harassed, and in some cases (more and more we'll see) they are arrested without cause, held without charges, and tortured without humanity.

What of Canada? We are spied on to the degree that we fall into the prey of the US telecom companies' webs, and to the degree that our own less-financed government spies can manage it and to the degree that they allow US authoritarian goons to have access to us. But we haven't yet got to the point where a Canadian Jose Padilla has been created. Our electoral process is still robustly immune to fraud at the provincial and federal levels. Our executive branch has a lot of power with little institutional "checks and balances" but we've seen how utterly useless those constitutional provisions can be.

At this point, Canada is the most democratic of the "three amigos," and that should actually be a cause for concern, not for celebration. But nevertheless, it is the case, and we Canadians must do what we can, both in spreading the truth and keeping each other up-to-date here in cyber-space, but also in the three-dimensional world, to stop and push-back, and ultimately destroy, the sick, inhuman criminal system being imposed upon us.

All peaceful avenues must be pursued. All defences against corporate criminals must be utilized. Revolutions don't happen until people make them happen.

It goes without saying, and I'm sure this will offend the "moderates" on the Canadian blogosphere, that we have to destroy the political influence of the scum-bags called the "Blogging Tories." Make no mistake about it; those ugly-minded cretins might be no more than laughable, contemptible buffoons right now, but if they were in Mexico, they'd be enforcing the dispossession of the peasantry, committing atrocities to retain mass acqueisence to their corporate pay-masters, justifying all their rapes, thefts, murders, with some sickeningly stupid yammering about "Christianity," "capitalism" and other rot. In the US, they're the doughy shlubs firing honest federal prosecutors, writing up bogus "intelligence" reports about impoverished countries terrifying weaponry, ethnically cleansing New Orleans, and (the more physically fit among them) terrorizing and killing for (and being exploited by) Blackwater.

All of this under the mantle of "conservatism" or "America" or "democracy," and, again "Christianity," or whatever it is that passes for intellectual and moral principles within their monkey-brains.